The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays [Paperback]

MADDIE NORRIS is the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work appears in Guernica, Fourth Genre, Territory, and Essay Daily, among other publications. Her essays have won the Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Ninth Letter and have been named as notable in Best American Essays. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

This debut essay collection is inspired by the grief Maddie Norris experienced in the wake of her father's death from cancer when she was seventeen. Norris uses a medical lens to examine the anguish that followed and likens mourning to wound care.

These linked essays examine grief from different angles, resulting in a multilayered exploration of why, contrary to popular belief, keeping wounds open is the best way to care for them physically and emotionally. Norris approaches the narrative through various topics—the investigation of body preservation, the history of skin grafts, and a deep dive into physical pain—all of them related to how she carries this fundamental loss.

By centering on the importance of mourning (a long-term practice frowned upon in Western culture), the essays unsettle conventional wisdom as the text pushes against the stereotypical notion of "letting go" and "moving on." The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays thus unpacks the question: What happens when, instead of following steps prescribed by those outside loss, we let ourselves dwell in grief?

A collection of lyric essays that discuss grief and lossThe Wet Wound is one of the most intense and revolutionary books I’ve read in the way it approaches grief. There is no getting over grief, the way we are expected to. There is only the wound and finding a way to live with it.